Last semester's lecture videos and test performance

I am teaching the same history class this semester as last. It is face to face and I do a lot of lecture. Last semester I used an Apple TV, an iPad Mini, and the Explain Everything app to record each of my lectures, which I made available to students for their review. This semester instead of doing the same I am giving my students access to last semester's lectures. I tell them the content is substantially the same as is what is important for the exams. The only difference are the jokes. I then wanted to see if there was any correlation between their performance on exams and whether they had looked at those online resources.

Captions for screen-capture videos

I do a modest number of screen-capture videos for my classes and blogs, and keeping them short includes among its benefits easier captioning. I used to rely on the speech-to-text capability built in to the Camtasia Studio product, but over the past few videos I have come to rely more often on YouTube's option to transcribe and set timings. I still use Camtasia to record my desktop videos but then publish directly to YouTube from there and click on the button to edit captions. I like the keyboard commands to control playback while typing what I hear, and the fact that YouTube handles the timing makes it much smoother. One thing I often forget is to publish the captions I typed and to unpublish YouTube's automatic captions. I would not want any YouTube fame to come from being one of those "caption fail" videos. ;-)

Flipping history and taking attendance

Last fall I taught a class with a peak enrollment of 84. We are required to document attendance where I teach so I therefore have to come up with some way to take roll each day. Yeah, like I am going to read out 84 names each time we meet (at least through the late-semester drop deadline). So I had a challenge with how I would take attendance in an efficient manner. I could have passed around a paper and asked them to sign in but I wanted to connect taking attendance to a learning activity.

Tweeting during a movie

I sometimes show films during my face-to-face history classes and find myself challenged in a couple of ways. Of course I show something that is relevant and that I want students to learn from, but letting go of that time together makes me feel a bit insecure. If they can get the lesson from watching a film, what is my purpose?

Constitution Day and a Google Form

Today I am celebrating Constitution Day in my history class by showing one of the Schoolhouse Rock videos that covers some aspect of the Constitution. There were five:

1. Preamble to the Constitution
2. Three-ring circus structure of federal government)
3. I'm just a bill (legislative process)
4. Electoral college (how the president is elected)
5. Sufferin' till suffrage (the vote for women)

This class covers US history up to 1865 so we haven't reached the constitution-writing stage. Maybe when we get there I will watch all five in class and ask the students to compare them to the text or other sources in terms of interpreting the Constitution.

For today we'll watch just one and I will have the class decide which by using a Google Form to conduct an in-class poll. I call this my "history quickie" and got a custom bit.ly link that points to the form. I try to do this each time we meet and ask them questions like what was the hardest thing to understand in class, etc. I post the summary of results inside my learning management system so students can see them.

I reuse the same form each day so that all the results are on the same spreadsheet. I found a trick to add the new question to the form then delete the old one. This creates a new column in the spreadsheet, which makes for easier collection of results if I want to do additional analysis.

And like true American democracy, this vote will not be perfect. The only voters will be people who have a smart phone, tablet, or laptop in class. So the more perfect union that the founders envisioned does not yet exist, at least in my history class.

Citing Online Sources

What is the difference between citing a source that was found on the web and citing a source that is a web page? Some students need to learn the difference. It becomes a problem when the source-found-on-the-web is cited using a URL that includes a temporary access key. This happens with students using the online research databases they can access via our library information system, and it is something to be aware of the next time I have students finding sources online.

Thoughts on group assignments

I divide groups in a couple of different ways. For my online student success class (taught fully online), I divide the class into four groups (usually seven or eight per group) based on their grade at that point in the class (three weeks into a six-week class) to do one small assignment. I use the course grade as a means of judging ability and responsibility, so each group has students who are roughly the same in those areas. The best students are in a group together, and the worst students are in a group together. My rationale is that high-functioning people need to learn how to deal with other high-functioning people and not assume that they will automatically be the leaders of any group they are in. At the other end, someone in the free riders will have to step up and show some leadership else the group will fail. They only have a week to complete the assignment. I find generally that students appreciate the group assignment (note I did not say enjoy), though the students in that bottom quartile who do not participate generally are not interested in the class anyway. None of the students complain about having flaky peers.

In my (full term) American history class, I create groups based on shared interest. This is a face-to-face class, though the assignment would be the same for an online class and the method of dividing the groups would likely not change. The group project for the class is to create a web site that requires students to collect primary source documents, analyze them, and write a synthesis of those analyses. One of my introductory lectures for the class is to show the students that some of the questions we are asking ourselves as Americans (like what our country's place is in the world) have always been asked. I present a series of questions and show examples of how those questions were asked in the time period covered by our course and how those questions are being asked today. I tell them that throughout our class those questions will come up again and again and that those questions help us as historians make sense of all the different ways we can look at the past. After the lecture, I ask each student to tell me what he or she thinks is the most important question. I use those answers to create groups of six to eight students, and those groups are together throughout the semester and the web site. I do this in lieu of an individual research paper, and they tell me in my end-of-class survey that they feel like they learn more about the past through this assignment than they would have with a traditional research paper. I use a peer review survey to get them to share how much effort they and their group mates put in, and I use the results of that survey to adjust individual grades.

Both of these methods require a lot of work. I could divide the class randomly or let students pick their own groups, but I like to have some kind of instructional design behind what I do in class. I have been grouping by ability in my online student success class for the dozen years that I have been teaching it, and so far it has worked great. I am grouping by interest for the second time this semester, and one change I have already made is to have my students do the peer review survey three times instead of once. That way they can adjust their work ethic if necessary before they get going on the big project.